The present invention relates to testing of integrated circuits, and more specifically, to pre-silicon functional testing of processors.
Pre-silicon functional testing of a processor, such as a microprocessor, may be accomplished by supplying test templates from a library into an automated testcase generation tool which produces assembly level instruction sequences from the templates. These templates may include certain mandatory functions configured to exercise certain architectural and microarchitectural functions within the microprocessor.
The libraries of templates are established where each template in the library is targeted to testing one or more selected characteristic or feature of the processor via simulation. When a new feature or attribute is added to the processor, it is desirable for a test engineer to test the new feature in addition to the existing tests performed by the established templates in the library. Manually adding the capability for testing a selected feature or characteristic to each template in a library would be inefficient and time consuming.